28608 - “MADMEN” IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS (REMOTE)

CWRU-Siegal Lifelong Learning

Course Description

Since Freud’s day, psychologists have reveled in psychoanalyzing Shakespeare’s characters, even those who are not “mad” by Renaissance criteria. In this course, after looking at how Elizabethans and Jacobeans viewed madness, we will consider more contemporary psychologists’ diagnoses of a selection of Shakespeare’s characters, and perhaps conduct a few of our own! In addition to doing close readings of three plays, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, and Macbeth, we will also devote our final week to comparing selected scenes from other plays to draw conclusions about Shakespeare’s insights into what we call mental disorders today.